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It's been a while. I've been through a couple of contract projects, worked for Sony for a bit, did a bunch of stuff to Noesis, and now I'm on another contract project. I think that pretty much sums up the last 9 months.
My current project is rather cool in concept, but I can't talk about it yet. In fact, I can't go into detail about any of the professional work I've done recently. Everyone loves NDA's. That aside, however, I figured it might still be fun to go through and highlight some of the more noteworthy changes/additions that have been made to Noesis since my last update here. Read more...
The Duke Nukem Forever demo is out. I can't even convey how surreal it is to me to be typing those words. But anyway, I've been poking around the demo for the last couple of days, and a new version of Noesis is up now that supports extracting 5 different variants of its included .dat packages.
The picture is of the world's first (well, probably) right and proper DNF content mod, with Duke sporting his brand new Takei Pride tanktop. Noesis spits out all of the info you need to re-inject textures while it's extracting them, and I've already got a fully functional repacker that I intend to release sometime relatively soon. I've also finished hammering out the model format now, and Noesis v3.27 and later can view/export them.
The process of exporting the models is pretty simple, but requires a few steps. Here's a step by step of what you need to do. Read more...
The -decim option in Noesis had been broken for a long time, because I never finished the concept I was working on for it. I recently decided to go back and implement something that actually works, and so a new version of Noesis with new mesh decimation functionality is up on the site now.
I had a few goals in mind for the new method. I wanted it to be really fast (and it is - it can take a Tekken 6 character from over 20,000 triangles to under 5,000 in under a couple of seconds on my machine), I wanted it to handle non-convex meshes, I wanted it to preserve UV's, normals, and skinning/weighting data reasonably well, and I wanted it to respect mesh boundaries for extremely segmented models. That's a lot to ask from an automated mesh decimation solution, but I think I've ended up with everything I wanted. Read more...
A few days ago, I decided to reverse engineer FX Fighter. Being a poor boy, I missed out on most of the Saturn gaming era, and FX Fighter running on my old 486 was my first actual experience with a 3D fighter outside of the arcade. So it'd been sitting on my list of games to reverse for nostalgia's sake, and I figured I'd tackle it one day, hopefully using a nice IDA Pro plugin for DOSBox integration that handled DOS4GW applications. (there is a plugin, but I've had no luck getting it to debug 32-bit DOS apps) But the urge just struck me last weekend, and I decided to go after it armed with nothing but IDA Pro and an old build of DOSBox with its debugger enabled. Now I'm going to write a whole article about the process!
This isn't so much intended to be a file spec, as it is just a direct chronicle of my experiences and findings in figuring the game's formats out, in the actual order of my work/discovery. It's like you're right there scoping through the binary with me! I'll describe all of my approaches and general methodology here, as well, so get ready to digest a lot. Read more...
Because I never even try to write meaningful things here anymore, I thought it might be a nice change of pace to actually mention something I've been working on lately. That would be a new R5900 emulator for Noesis. Read more...
The PayPal donation button is now located under the About section. As mentioned previously, don't feel obligated to donate, and doing so doesn't win you the right to dictate my actions or the features I'll implement in any of my projects. It's just a way to say thanks to me if you found something I did/made useful. If just saying thanks isn't enough.
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Fish Scratch Fever
March 29, 2012 at 6:45 am (CST)
19 comments
It's been a while. I've been through a couple of contract projects, worked for Sony for a bit, did a bunch of stuff to Noesis, and now I'm on another contract project. I think that pretty much sums up the last 9 months.My current project is rather cool in concept, but I can't talk about it yet. In fact, I can't go into detail about any of the professional work I've done recently. Everyone loves NDA's. That aside, however, I figured it might still be fun to go through and highlight some of the more noteworthy changes/additions that have been made to Noesis since my last update here. Read more...
Tags: Projects
Duke Nukem Forever
June 4, 2011 at 7:42 pm (CST)
The Duke Nukem Forever demo is out. I can't even convey how surreal it is to me to be typing those words. But anyway, I've been poking around the demo for the last couple of days, and a new version of Noesis is up now that supports extracting 5 different variants of its included .dat packages.The picture is of the world's first (well, probably) right and proper DNF content mod, with Duke sporting his brand new Takei Pride tanktop. Noesis spits out all of the info you need to re-inject textures while it's extracting them, and I've already got a fully functional repacker that I intend to release sometime relatively soon. I've also finished hammering out the model format now, and Noesis v3.27 and later can view/export them.
The process of exporting the models is pretty simple, but requires a few steps. Here's a step by step of what you need to do. Read more...
Tags: Projects, Technology
Decimation
June 2, 2011 at 11:42 pm (CST)
The -decim option in Noesis had been broken for a long time, because I never finished the concept I was working on for it. I recently decided to go back and implement something that actually works, and so a new version of Noesis with new mesh decimation functionality is up on the site now.I had a few goals in mind for the new method. I wanted it to be really fast (and it is - it can take a Tekken 6 character from over 20,000 triangles to under 5,000 in under a couple of seconds on my machine), I wanted it to handle non-convex meshes, I wanted it to preserve UV's, normals, and skinning/weighting data reasonably well, and I wanted it to respect mesh boundaries for extremely segmented models. That's a lot to ask from an automated mesh decimation solution, but I think I've ended up with everything I wanted. Read more...
Tags: Projects
FX Fighter
April 20, 2011 at 5:49 am (CST)
A few days ago, I decided to reverse engineer FX Fighter. Being a poor boy, I missed out on most of the Saturn gaming era, and FX Fighter running on my old 486 was my first actual experience with a 3D fighter outside of the arcade. So it'd been sitting on my list of games to reverse for nostalgia's sake, and I figured I'd tackle it one day, hopefully using a nice IDA Pro plugin for DOSBox integration that handled DOS4GW applications. (there is a plugin, but I've had no luck getting it to debug 32-bit DOS apps) But the urge just struck me last weekend, and I decided to go after it armed with nothing but IDA Pro and an old build of DOSBox with its debugger enabled. Now I'm going to write a whole article about the process!This isn't so much intended to be a file spec, as it is just a direct chronicle of my experiences and findings in figuring the game's formats out, in the actual order of my work/discovery. It's like you're right there scoping through the binary with me! I'll describe all of my approaches and general methodology here, as well, so get ready to digest a lot. Read more...
Tags: Projects, Technology
R5900 Emulation
March 22, 2011 at 12:59 am (CST)
Because I never even try to write meaningful things here anymore, I thought it might be a nice change of pace to actually mention something I've been working on lately. That would be a new R5900 emulator for Noesis. Read more...
PayPal Donations
February 22, 2011 at 4:49 am (CST)
The PayPal donation button is now located under the About section. As mentioned previously, don't feel obligated to donate, and doing so doesn't win you the right to dictate my actions or the features I'll implement in any of my projects. It's just a way to say thanks to me if you found something I did/made useful. If just saying thanks isn't enough.
[1] 2 ... Next
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